For the past three years Dr. Kathleen Mary Ponder has held the position of Global Director of Learning Methods at Duke Corporate Education. Responsible for designing and delivering Duke CE’s innovative, break-through approaches to executive education around the world, she has designed and delivered programs for multinational corporations in India, Asia, Europe, and the U.S. Using a business challenge as their focus, her team creates solutions embracing and leveraging the cognitive, affective and, at times, spiritual and physical capacities of executives. Their success stems from using not only academic specialists but non-traditional educational providers such as orchestra conductors, firefighters, athletes, and medical doctors to bring business lessons alive.

Prior to assuming her current role, Kathleen held a number of senior leadership roles at the Center for Creative Leadership, directing their Global Des…

Tom Friedman in his book The World is Flat notes that global economic systems are integrating and countries like India and China are at the center of this phenomenon. However, the recent incidents of racial attacks on Indian students in Australia indicate that we still have a long way to go before we integrate our hearts and souls.

Even an earlier study conducted by Monash University in 2005 found that nearly half the international students interviewed had experienced discrimination and isolation in Australian universities. Does that mean Australia has a failed to address the problem of racism? Maybe. Should Indian students exclude considering Australia as a destination? Definitely not.

Bettina Büchel is Professor of Strategy and Organization at IMD – International Institute for Management Development located in Lausanne, Switzerland. Her current research topics include strategy implementation, new business development, strategic alliances and change management.At IMD, she is the director of two public programs (OWP and Strategic Leadership for Women) and in-company programs and has worked with executive teams to develop and implement strategies. In addition, she has been a consultant in private and public companies in Asia and Europe, e.g. Nestlé, Eli Lilly, Linde, Holcim, UBS, WHO, Telephone Organization of Thailand. Based on her work with companies, she has written numerous case studies on organizations across the world such as Nestlé, BASF, SGS, Holcim, Deutsche Bank, Nira Refinery in India and Legend in China.Professor Büchel is of German origin and grew up in Malaysia. She received her bachelor of economics and public administration at the University of Constan…

This week I attended NAFSA: Association of International Educators annual conference in Los Angeles. NAFSA was founded in 1948 and last year celebrated 60 years of advancing international education. It has nearly 10,000 members at 3,500 institutions, representing over 150 countries. I have attended several professional conferences earlier, but this one was unique in several ways:

1. Scale: There were nearly 7,500 attendees, 200 sessions and 400 exhibitors at the conference making it one of the largest conferences on education.2. Global dimension: International participants from all over the world constituted nearly 45% of the total attendees (~3,300). 3. Knowledge spectrum: Sessions were on a range of topics including recruitment, admissions, leadership, curriculum, research and study abroad and hence being valuable to both faculty/researchers and administrators. 4. Event Management: Meticulous and professional event management despite huge size of the conference.